


false ghosts

by mornen



Series: I see a darkness in you [8]
Category: The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Angst, Childhood, Family, Gen, Ghosts, Horror, Magic, Nightmares, Thunderstorms, there are differences between peredhil and elves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-01
Updated: 2020-07-01
Packaged: 2021-03-04 18:20:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,390
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25020793
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mornen/pseuds/mornen
Summary: Arwen sees the future. And Elladan the past. Elrohir sees the present, but that hasn’t hurt him. (Yet.) But they all see Elrond’s dreams, his mind. Each other’s. Usually it’s fine, though none of them have any real concept of privacy, but it gets hard when dreams or nightmares explode and spiral. When they become layers over each other and mix up with stories. When there are ghosts that won’t leave them.
Series: I see a darkness in you [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2025992
Comments: 9
Kudos: 29





	false ghosts

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ilya_Boltagon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ilya_Boltagon/gifts).



Arwen wakes with a red hand print on her arm from where she gripped herself in her sleep. Her head is still swirling with images of red hair and grey eyes that aren’t her father’s watching her. The long blue curtains in her window drag across the floor. Her pillows are scattered on the rug around the bed and one is thrown across the room. She sits up and slides her legs off the bed. She sits, head bent, and her hair falls in a curtain around her and blocks out the room until everything she sees is black and blue.

She sees blue eyes now, black hair. The curve of a smile that isn’t sure if it will be a smile or if it will fade away. The blue eyes tremble with tears. The smile fades.

‘What are you staring at?’ Maglor asks.

Arwen pushes her hair off her face, and Elrond is there.

Elrond kneels in front of her and takes her hands. She looks like him (looks like Lúthien); he can hear the screams inside her head when she is racked in nightmares, but she can hear his too. She is shaking. It’s summer. It’s hot. It’s hot in the night, and all the stars are lit, and people are singing, and the night is hot and blue, but she shakes like there is a blizzard trapped inside her. She doesn’t want to know.

‘I’m sorry,’ Elrond says. ‘I wish I could spare you this.’

Arwen looks down at their hands. Hers are so small in his. She touches his ring. Vilya. She traces her finger around and around it. She watches the shadow of her finger slip over it. She feels sick.

Elrond drags her off the bed into his arms and stands with her. She wraps her arms around his neck. He rocks her as he holds her. Arwen watches her feet as they slip over his legs. He is tall, so she is high off the ground. She is only five feet tall, and he is sixteen and a half inches taller, and when she is in his arms, she feels like she could be floating.

‘Ease it, Ada,’ she whispers, and her voice sounds like someone else’s. She breathes out against his ear where her head is pressed to his head. She feels faint. She is weak. She feels something move through her body that she doesn’t want there.

Elrond rests his hand on her head and whispers low a song that sounds like rain. The visions spinning through her head grow dim. The scream ringing inside of her softens. Elrond holds her with one strong arm and sings. Arwen breathes out again. Elrond kisses her.

‘Does it hurt?’

It hurts. Her chest feels tight. Her heart is pressed. She has a weight on her chest crushing her lungs. Her muscles ache and tremble. Her blood runs too hot through her body. Elrond steadies her in his arms.

‘Of course it hurts,’ he whispers.

She doesn’t know if her body can contain her spirit. Maybe she is like Fëanor, and she will burst into flames, burn down to ash, float away on the wind. (Maybe she is more powerful than Fëanor.)

She feels everything in her body – nerves, muscles, ligaments. She could count the pores in her skin.

‘Ada,’ she says. She watches the sky with wide eyes. She feels the oxygen pierce her eyeballs. She can see through the cliffs to the sea far beyond. The sky is blue and electric. She breathes in sharply.

She sees a door wrought from night. It trembles.

She sees a man kneeling on the forest floor, black sword beside him, hands empty in front of him. Blood rises from his hands. He looks up at her. He shakes.

‘Arwen,’ he says.

Arwen clutches at Elrond like he could somehow take her fëa from her so that it wouldn’t hurt her. He could take the excess and absorb it into his fëa. He could hold it for her so that she wouldn’t have to feel it rip into her body and cut her the way it does now. She feels like she will fall open, peel apart. Her blood is hot enough to evaporate.

‘It hurts,’ she says. ‘It hurts. It hurts. It hurts.’ Her breath is shaky. Her voice comes out strangled and distant. She grabs at his hair and drags it around her. ‘It hurts. It hurts like death. It hurts.’

She knows death hurts because she has felt it in his dreams. She has seen it in his memories. She felt the snap of his mind when Elros died. Her brothers did too. Would it be like that for them if one of them died? Is that why they cling to each other? Why they all cling to each other. No one else knows what this is like. Not even her mother knows what this is like. Something in their blood runs holy. (It burns.)

Her mind reels. Elrond tries to calm her with his music, but the coming storm is too great, and her fëa rises up to greet it. Elrond’s nightmare runs through her head.

She knows how Gil-galad screamed when he died. She has heard it. It still echoes in her ears. She saw him throw Elrond back and then die. Elrond doesn’t like to talk about it. But he’s talked about it with her because she saw it. (He talks to her about everything.) Gil-galad threw him back. Sauron would have killed him first. Because he was protecting Gil-galad. (Because he looked like Lúthien.)

Gil-galad threw him back. Gil-galad screamed. He died.

Arwen trembles. She is lost in that battle. Lost in Isildur’s arms. Isildur holds onto her like he wants to crush her ribs in. He screams in her ear. Then there is Maglor again with his sword dripping blood in the water. Elros standing by the waterfall. Maedhros with his red hair matted with blood. Isildur screaming. Sauron reaching. Sauron’s golden eyes with the pupils blown wide with fear and rage. He touches her, but his hand slides through her body, and he disappears.

‘Arwen,’ Túrin says again. He kneels, and a river runs around him. He lifts his head. ‘Arwen.’ This, at least, isn’t real. (Can’t be real.) Tears run down Túrin’s cheeks, but his face is still. The water pulls back around him, gathering fast into a silver wave. It lifts over his head and rushes down over him.

The weight of the wave crushes her. Arwen screams. The world goes dark.

* * *

Arwen wakes on her bed in Elrond’s arms in the grey morning. Elladan sits in her reading chair, watching them. Her head feels clearer. Elrond’s tampered with her memories again. She rolls away from him. She has to trust him. (Sometimes she doesn’t.)

‘Does it get easier?’ Arwen asks. Her throat aches.

‘It does,’ Elladan answers.

Arwen sits up. Elrond keeps his hand on her hand. Arwen touches her throat. She can’t remember what she saw, but she does remember that she screamed. She touches her hair and the softest part of her arm. There are no marks on it now. Her pillows are piled on her bed.

‘When?’ she asks.

‘I don’t know,’ Elladan says. ‘It does.’ He is one hundred and thirty-five, and she is only twenty-four. It is a long time to wait. ‘I think you might have that one harder,’ he says. ‘His dreams. I don’t know.’

Arwen sees the future. And Elladan the past. Elrohir sees the present, but that hasn’t hurt him yet. (She knows it will.) But they all see Elrond’s dreams, his mind. Each other’s. Usually it’s fine, though none of them have any real concept of privacy, but it gets hard when dreams or nightmares explode and spiral. When they become layers over each other and mix up with stories. When there are ghosts that won’t leave them.

And sometimes it’s hard to separate yourself from the others. She can feel Elrond’s heartbeat beside her own. It’s like having two hearts, and they won’t beat in harmony. She knows Elrohir is with Celebrían, awake and talking outside. She can feel the moss beneath his hand. She passes her hand over her face. This is being bound. There’s a chain inside of her that will keep her alive. If Elrond died, she would too.

Elladan gets up and sits beside her. He rests his hand on her shoulder. Arwen tries to smile at him. He is so gentle with her. His eyes are dark grey with specks of gold like the sun catching on storm clouds. There is a storm in his eyes and a storm gathering outside. The colours of the room change as the light fades. Elladan’s storm grey eyes turn obsidian.

Arwen touches his cheek. They are the only people in the world who aren’t afraid of one another, but sometimes, sometimes, she is afraid of all of them and of herself. She feels the air buzzing with electricity. It is worse during storms like this. She is more powerful, and she cannot contain it inside of her.

She looks down and there is blood on her hands and it runs through her fingers and disappears into the air. She closes her eyes and it is gone when she opens them again. She runs her finger down the line on her palm. She studies her fingers. Her fingerprints are all the same: perfect oval spirals that fit into each other without variance. They are Elrond’s exactly. Her brothers’ too. She does not know what this means.

Elrond gathers them both into his arms so that Arwen is pressed between her brother and father. Now she has three heartbeats.

It starts to rain all at once. The rain sweeps down, and the air blossoms with new scents. The air is easier to breathe in. Arwen watches the glimmer of the rain, coming down from the blue sky, orange or white beneath the lamp light. She holds Elrond’s hand over her heart. She thinks maybe she can live with it.

Thunder rolls, far away, moving closer. The deepness of its boom echoes through the valley. Lightning crosses in the sky above the mountains.

Elrohir and Celebrían come in together and join the rest of them on the bed. Celebrían lies behind Elladan and takes Arwen’s hand. Elrohir curls up against Elrond. Celebrían stares at Elrond past Elladan’s shoulder, over Arwen’s head. A bolt of lightning lights up the sky, lights Celebrían’s silver hair as white like snow. Then the room is blue again.

The rain on the leaves sounds like Elrond’s song, the song that was not strong enough to calm her. (Not now.) It’s hard when it’s not enough. Arwen closes her eyes. A bolt of lightning lights her world red.

The trees are black and shake beneath the wind. Elrohir rolls off the bed and stands by the window.

‘I feel the river,’ he says. He reaches a hand out the window. ‘It is glad.’

‘Yes, glad for the rain,’ Elrond says. ‘It will be stronger.’

Strong enough to break a neck. Strong enough to lift boulders and carry them as light as marbles. A thousand cuts beneath the waves.

‘Níniel!’ Túrin cries. ‘Nienor!’

Celebrían lies on her back, head tipped to the side to watch out the window. She holds her arm over Elladan, not letting go of Arwen’s hand.

Arwen feels the surge of river inside of Elrond’s fëa. It lights his eyes. The Bruinen loves Elrond. It is jealous of Celebrían. But maybe someday it will love Arwen too.

The sky turns violet. Arwen sits up. The storm surges through her body. She could fly on the wind is she tried.

‘I’ll take them out into the storm,’ Elrond says.

‘I’ll come,’ Celebrían says.

‘The lightning is too close,’ Elrond whispers.

They can be struck by lightning.

Elrond’s been struck by lightning, so Arwen knows how it feels. How it surges through you and lights you alive. How it sends your hair flying. How they won’t die. How elves can die. (They aren’t elves.) And maybe they can’t see as far, and maybe ghosts can hurt them, but they can be struck by lightning and never die.

Elrohir touches her hair, and she has four heartbeats.

Celebrían lets go of Arwen’s hand. She sits up and draws her knees to her chest. She watches the storm with eyes as blue as a noon sky. Arwen has never seen them change colour.

* * *

The Bruinen is wild with the storm. Arwen walks beside the bank beneath the reaching rain. Elrond holds her hand. He does not let go of her, not for a moment. Elladan and Elrohir follow behind them.

Arwen’s hair flies up into the air. It waves around her head as if it weren’t heavy with rain. Elrond’s hair flies too. His eyes are bright. He glows in the dark. Arwen closes her eyes, but she can still see him.

_Níniel. Nienor._

(She walks just behind them.)

What is it like to be named after mourning, both times? Arwen looks over her shoulder. Nienor stares at her.

‘Ada!’ Arwen starts to cry. Elrond drags her into his arms, and Nienor is gone. Elrohir touches Arwen’s cheek.

‘I saw her too.’

Arwen presses her face to Elrond’s arm. If she threw herself into the river, she would not die.

‘They’re not real, my love,’ Elrond says. ‘They aren’t real ghosts, my love. They will not hurt you.’ He rests his hand over her heart, and she has no heartbeat. ‘Not more than this.’

Lightning surges above them. It lights up the leaves and the branches of the swaying trees. Thunder shakes the ground after it, shakes her body, shouts through her. Arwen shouts out with it and jumps up. She falls down ten seconds later. She screams again, and the thunder covers it, and the wind takes it away.

She wrenches her hand free from her father and runs. She runs, and the wind presses at her, and the wind lifts her, and she flies for a few moments, and she screams, and if she died then, if she really died, she could not be counted among elves or men.

So when the lighting strikes her, she does not die.


End file.
